University of Washington

Seeing Is Believing New tools, better access bring striking visual insights for decision makers T here's a graph that Chief Financial Officer Ben Robinson loves. The single image tells the story of UW's School of Public Health. It shows a seven-year trajectory for each of the seven Public Health programs, with the number of students enrolled and the amount of research awards generated by each. Robinson created it with Tableau data visualization software, using data from the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). "This was the first clear picture of who we are and what we do—and here it is on one slide," Robinson said. "Before this, we never had a single cohesive understanding of the School. There were simply so many moving parts that a spreadsheet could never capture our story so simply and clearly." Now, generating insights like this—definitive, useful, easy to understand and based on nearly real-time data—is simple, efficient, and even fun, Robinson said, thanks to Tableau, EDW, and interactive reports and data sets developed by UW-IT. "Tableau is the first thing I turn on every morning and the last thing I turn off every night," Robinson said. "I use it in every aspect of what I do, from budgeting and forecasting to immediately answering questions in meetings with real-time data." "Our big goal for this year was making the EDW data more accessible," said Anja CanfieldBudde, UW-IT's Director for Enterprise Data & Analytics. "We want every decision maker to have access to reliable, comprehensive, central data, and useful ways to work with it." 4 UW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

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